It is indeed.
Now it’s even worse. This shows you where the net has problem passing stuff along, and that accumulates as loads on certain chokepoints. One of the chokepoints is close to FR, so you can have problems reading FR to different degree depending on where in the world you are.
What sets this stuff off can be at least two things: heavy traffic accruing to google, which does a tipover to the chokepoint near FR as default, oro stuff like the geomagnetic storm we just had.
I am sure that means things to tekkies of which I once aspired to be but got over it.
By checkpoint
you mean NSA data-collection facility, no?